Quote: I just deleted over 25,000 songs from my iTunes library. I am going to trust in the cloud, where my library now lives. I'm a bit scared, but I backed everything up, took a deep breath and stepped into the future.

Abandoning the way I've come to listen to music over the last decade feels like a big experiment, but in some ways, the decision was a long time coming. I've been close to maxing out the hard drive space on my laptop for a while, and in a single day this week, I reclaimed nearly 200 gigabytes.

I'm using iTunes Match, Apple's cloud-based service. Before I deleted the songs, the service scanned my music library, "matched" all the music that is available in the iTunes store, and uploaded what isn't. Now, my entire library is accessible from anywhere I can get a wireless Internet or cell phone signal. Another benefit: since I used to rip my music at 128kbps, much of my "library" now sounds better, since Apple's songs are encoded at 256kbps. It doesn't matter if the original was purchased from Amazon's mp3 store, ripped from a CD, downloaded from a friend or obtained illegally — I now have a legit 256kbps version. (It sounds great on my stereo, my phone and in my car, if you're wondering.)

For those songs that aren't in the iTunes store, you hear exact same file you uploaded. And no matter whether it was in the iTunes store, each song's metadata, album art, song ratings and comments you may have written in stay attached to the version you stream from the cloud.

As I said, this is an experiment for me and I'll keep you posted on how it works out. My collection of LPs is around a thousand. I have about 2,500 CDs. Listening to my digital collection would take 76 days. These days, most people aren't filling up walls with albums and CDs, maybe a small stack of special vinyl. For many, the library of the future looks something like Spotify — nearly everything you could imagine, delivered with little effort, like an old AM radio signal into your home or car, but with much better sound.

I'll miss the physical, the tangible, but that's been feeling like a thing of the past anyway ... I still miss liner notes, still wish digital would have more information to read while I'm listening and not sure why we haven't all kicked up a bigger fuss about that. Streaming my collection or curating a playlist or a few dozen playlists and having knowing they'll be there when you go to listen is an issue of trust. Right now, I feel like trusting.

Neat article from NPR. As music is moving out of the "hard drive" medium, into the "cloud" medium (CD's are like dinosaurs and vinyl might as well be single-celled organisms at this point) things are moving at fast speeds. Who knew what a cloud was 3 years ago? Has anyone else taken the plunge? I haven't, I have seen too many issues with the cloud. It's not stable yet, in my opinion. That's coming from the perspective of someone who works at a software company with a cloud-based application.

Fri Jun 01, 2012 1:40 pm

Marcus Forealius

Joined: 31 Jan 2005
Posts: 553

I don't have an iPhone/iPod or use Cloud. During my back and forth commute, I have a small flash drive that plugs into my car stereo and this serves me well.

Although I do still purchase CDs (and vinyl when available) of artists that I enjoy, I find that at home I will typically pull the album up on Spotify or something, unless I really want to hear it on record.

Maybe that's partially succumbing to the new order of things, but it still feels too weird for this hoarder to not have my physical copies of my music.

Fri Jun 01, 2012 2:05 pm

anomalyLoserface

Joined: 22 May 2008
Posts: 2622
Location: DFW, TX

Fri Jun 01, 2012 2:16 pm

Jesse

Joined: 02 Jul 2002
Posts: 6165
Location: privileged homeless

standing in stark contrast to the many things that are appealing about this from a convenience standpoint, the idea of relying on a stable and torrentially swift wifi or cellular data connection for listening to my music collection makes me want to smash my own head with a brick.

I don't want bandwidth to be a factor in how I listen to music, or only be able to listen to music in certain places even on my portable device, or pay through the eye sockets for either huge amounts of data transfer or extortion-level unlimited plans.

This is a plan whereby you are always downloading everything you listen to, and never storing it.

plus also hi there eventually Apple is gonna do something crazy and horrific with your files and your access to your files and your life is going to be a sad and lonely march to the grave from there on in.

yeah I don't like this idea. the cloud is better for other things.

Fri Jun 01, 2012 4:42 pm

mancabbage

Joined: 29 Jun 2005
Posts: 9267
Location: london

Jesse wrote:
This is a plan whereby you are always downloading everything you listen to, and never storing it.

No it isn't, you can download as much of it as you want back to any of your devices, any time you want. It stays there till you delete it again whereby your asked if you wana just delete the file from your computer or your itunes cloud library too

I really like this, its one of those technologies that kinda blows me away when it works. Its like summoning songs from your cd collection

First I backed up all mine to google music (free) then purchased the iTunes match just because it works nicely with my phone and iTunes (and gives you free hq quality stuff for the bad mp3's you nicked back in the napster days). I love it, it just downloads the songs as you listen to them, there's no lag delay or anything when you're at home on your wifi.

I'm doing 8 hours on coaches every two weeks, whenever I do that I just download a bunch of albums and stick them on my iPhone when Im at home with the wireless.

To download tons on your data would be kinda silly, but it can be nice for the odd track... The other day i was walking to the tube and got the sudden urge to listen to since i been loving you by led zep, didn't have it on the phone, bollocks... couple of clicks and I had summoned it from the sky and was listening to it within about 20 seconds. made me smile

Fri Jun 01, 2012 5:47 pm

NeuroA champion of Kurtis SP

Joined: 19 Jul 2002
Posts: 7839

i tried tellin yall , apple/itunes was gonna be the best for this

having said that, i still like my cds and hardrives and wont jumping to this for awhile still

Fri Jun 01, 2012 8:52 pm

Limbs

Joined: 04 Feb 2011
Posts: 955

I can't ever see myself doing this but I'm sure I will after everyone else has. I just recently got an external hard drive to dump music on that I rarely listen to.

I don't even live with my vinyl anymore because I don't feel like lugging them and reorganizing them so when people come over they think I'm hip. I don't know. I'm fighting it out of spite, it seems. I'll be in the clouds in a few years. Let me know when it's trustworthy.

Sat Jun 02, 2012 9:25 am

Mark in Minnesota

Joined: 02 Jan 2004
Posts: 2050
Location: Saint Louis Park, MN

I will use that approach when there is a uPNP server I can operate on my home network which functions as an offline mirror of the cloud's data store. If it's not uPNP then I can't stream music while I'm playing Xbox games and that's a quality of life issue for me.

Sat Jun 02, 2012 10:06 am

Jesse

Joined: 02 Jul 2002
Posts: 6165
Location: privileged homeless

mancabbage wrote:

Jesse wrote: This is a plan whereby you are always downloading everything you listen to, and never storing it.

No it isn't, you can download as much of it as you want back to any of your devices, any time you want. It stays there till you delete it again whereby your asked if you wana just delete the file from your computer or your itunes cloud library too

Oh word? I guess I misunderstood. That's far less awful than what I was envisioning. I feel like it still means using a crazy amount of data to transfer stuff you already own, but not EVERY time you want to bump it, so that makes a big difference.

I still just want an enormous capacity music player, and I'm mad that they've been so blatantly torpedoed to make way for this shit. I just want to carry a terrabyte in my pocket - it can be a little heavy, I'm a big strong person - and have it work like my Zune or an iPod. I'm resigned to the stupid organizing software, even, and spending half of my adult life tagging and re-tagging files. I'll do it. I just want to then have them all in my pocket, always. All at once.

Jeez.

Sat Jun 02, 2012 8:39 pm

NeuroA champion of Kurtis SP

Joined: 19 Jul 2002
Posts: 7839

im going to inhale all your digital clouds and transform into a cyborg-pod-bot-ship and take your music across the universe and upload to the aliens stereo-er-o boomblastermaster boxes, #intergalacticsharing

Sun Jun 03, 2012 12:39 pm

Captiv8

Joined: 25 Aug 2006
Posts: 8546
Location: Third Coast

I wish I had trusted this Cloud stuff a few months ago when I accidentally fried my iPod. I lost a bunch of music that I only had on it (which was incidentally because of a previous computer crash). As the only place I kept my music though? I don't know. It seems a little unstable, but I'm sure it'll be like a little music safe in the sky in a few more months, or maybe even a year or two. I'm in no rush these days.

Sun Jun 03, 2012 8:18 pm

mancabbage

Joined: 29 Jun 2005
Posts: 9267
Location: london

why don't you guys back up to google music... its free, nice to have a backup no?

Sun Jun 03, 2012 9:21 pm

redball

Joined: 12 May 2006
Posts: 6877
Location: Northern New Jersey

I don't know why you'd delete your local copies of your music. To me, that's pretty dumb. Even the biggest cloud services have problems, downtime, and data loss. It happens.

That said, you should be using the current state of free and cheap cloud storage to backup your music. Apple's offering is great if you've bought into their ecosystem. If not, Google Music is very good. Unfortunately for Amazon their cloud player has become an also-ran, but it's decent in its own right.

I use Google Music for most of my listening. It means I don't have to have all my music on my phone but I can listen to everything. Jesse's vision of a TB music player? By the time it happens it'll be completely overlooked. Why carry around a TB drive of any sort when you can store it in the cloud for far cheaper and enjoy all the added benefits? Google Music and iCloud already do this. I have 55GB of music in my iTunes library, and all of it is available on my 32GB phone.

My music is sextuple backed up, though. I have my library on my laptop (1). I have it copied onto my server (2). I have CrashPlan running backing up to my server (3) and CrashPlan's remote facilities (4). I have it all in Google Music (5). I have 98% of it in Amazon's MP3 service (6). Some stuff I also have on my phone, my old phone, my work computer, and even in Dropbox. Oh yeah, and I haven't thrown out any of my CDs. If I ever lose more than $10 worth of music, it probably means nuclear war has begun.

Sun Jun 03, 2012 10:16 pm

anomalyLoserface

Joined: 22 May 2008
Posts: 2622
Location: DFW, TX

harddrivez 4 lyfe.

Sun Jun 03, 2012 10:22 pm

tommi teardrop

Joined: 12 Apr 2007
Posts: 2217
Location: Las Vegas

Aren't we getting close to just being able to stream any song ever made from apps like spotify? As spotify and soundcloud grow larger it seems like I barely even need to access my own music. If datpiff had an app, I think I could give up on my copies of music altogether.

Mon Jun 04, 2012 10:32 am

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